Chris Powell: Wage discrimination bill makes truth illegal

Mark E. Ojakian, president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, speaks to the New Haven Register Editorial Board recently.

Mark E. Ojakian, president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, speaks to the New Haven Register Editorial Board recently.

Photo: New Haven Register File Photo

Chris Powell: Wage discrimination bill makes truth illegal

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Wishing has yet to make anything so, but the belief that it does may be strongest in Connecticut, where the General Assembly soon may pass legislation to forbid employers from inquiring about the salary history of job applicants.

The legislation’s advocates claim that disclosing salary history perpetuates wage discrimination against women. But they also claim that suppressing salary history will help male applicants too, thereby contradicting their discrimination claim.

In fact salary history information gives an employer a better idea of any applicant’s skills and progress. The information also helps employers evaluate their own pay scales.

The claim that the legislation will combat wage discrimination is also contradicted by another of its provisions, cited last week by CT News Junkie’s Christine Stuart. For the legislation would punish employers for reducing an employee’s seniority for time spent on maternity or family leave.

This provision identifies, if inadvertently, the primary problem behind the supposed “gender gap” in salaries — the great tendency in society for women to accept child-care duties and men to reject them. So now people taking child-care leave — primarily women — are to be assumed to be gaining job skills and experience when they stay home, and employers are to pay them as if they never left.

There is unfairness here, but it is only the difference between the sexes that is more creditable to women. There would be still more unfairness in sticking on employers particularly rather than society generally the expense of remediating that unfairness.

Of course women are always able on their own to prevent the problem. Nobody makes them have children, nor to have them without an understanding that the fathers are at least to share child-care responsibility. Most childless women escape what is called wage discrimination. But these days people enjoy imagining themselves as victims, and politicians have much to gain by portraying them as such, though any victimization through childbearing is entirely a choice.

Besides, supposed gender discrimination is the least of the wage problem in Connecticut. For as the Kaiser Family Foundation reported recently — what is probably all that needs to be known about Connecticut’s future — nearly half the births in the state, 47 percent, are being financed by Medicaid. That is, nearly half the births in Connecticut are to women on welfare, women who are no more prepared to have and support children and to undertake work capable of supporting a family than the General Assembly is prepared to tell the truth. Indeed, the real objective of the legislation to forbid inquiry about salary history is to miss the point by making the truth illegal.

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LOWER EDUCATION IS THE PROBLEM: Missing the point is all that will be accomplished by controversy over the proposal of the president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, Mark Ojakian, to reduce the system’s administrative expenses by tens of millions of dollars to cope with state government’s financial collapse. Some community colleges might lose their own presidents and be supervised remotely.

That might be too bad, just as it might be too bad if Ojakian’s own salary, more than $550,000 per year, escapes review of administrative expenses. But the real problem with education in Connecticut is not higher education but lower education. For half to two-thirds of the state’s high school seniors are graduated without ever mastering high school work in a system of social promotion.

A lot more money could be saved if mere remediation was squeezed out of education.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.